~chron

At the beginning of the season I was somewhat pessimistic about the direction they were going with holy arena. I won’t argue that the paladins of season 5 were balanced, but the aggressive style and CC options made for some very entertaining gameplay.

After having had a few weeks to play some live games, though, I’m pretty satisfied with what turned out to be very even-handed changes to paladin healing. Paladins haven’t disappeared from SK, they still have a number of viable comps to run. Blizzard didn’t outright kill any of the specs, quite the opposite – as far as I know this is the first season that paladins have had a viable healing spec in every tree.

The old repentance spec of S5 has become 32/0/39. Since you can’t feasibly get Infusion of Light with any of the nice ret stuff, you push even deeper into ret to pick up Art of War and Fanatacism, which means you get an instant FoL on your judgement crits (instead of HS crits) and your judgements crit at a reasonable rate. Some people take Seal of Command for the guaranteed crit versus stunned targets, but I haven’t found it that useful.

You still get the ret utility you know and love – most importantly Divine Purpose and Repentance; but Sanctified Retribution is also a lot stronger without the specific aura requirement. Judgements of the Wise has actually been buffed and now returns a huge amount of mana (25% of base) every judge. Pursuit of Justice and Vindication are both still amazing.

The deep holy alternative has become 49/22/0. The protection talents they’ve changed up in 3.1 are amazing, with Divinity and Improved Devotion Aura increasing your healing substantially and Stoicism + Improved Righteous Fury increasing your survivability noticeably. Having a second Sac in the form of Divine Sacrifice is absolutely amazing, and makes a lot of double DPS or CC-heavy compositions a ton easier.

This also gives you the throughput talents in deep holy, such as Judgements of the Pure, Holy Guidance, Infusion, and Light’s Grace. Enlightened Judgements (increasing range to 40 yards) is also pretty useful now that Judgement is your only real way to keep people in combat or snipe totems. This spec feels a lot like the TBC paladin – you do have to drink, but it’s usually possible to set up opportunities to do so. 40 second HoJ is nice but doesn’t give you nearly as much CC potential as repentance does.

Which brings us to the dark horse of the collection, 20/51/0 deep protection. It sounds crazy until you actually look at the control possibilities and raw healing power of the available at the bottom of the tree. You get a 20 second HoJ (!) along with a 3 second silence and a daze on your Avenger’s Shield (30 second cooldown), which also increases your damage contribution. You get undispellable Divine Plea that refreshes on melee hits. You get a bunch of free stamina from talents like Sacred Duty (and some passive defenses like Ardent Defender) and then you convert that stamina into spellpower via Touched by the Light. You end up with a huge amount of spellpower, and although your crit is lower than the ret subspec when you do crit you’re looking at 8.5k flashes (10k+ on a warlock or mutilate rogue!).

The huge downside to the prot spec is, of course, the complete lack of any sort of instant healing. The new Aura Mastery helps here, and part of it is just adapting to the playstyle, but it’s a limitation and it makes the spec a lot weaker when you’re tanking a melee who can interrupt. Which, in a way, is also a lot like TBC!

I hear actual ret and prot paladins aren’t doing too badly, either.

chronic Arena, Paladin Arena, Paladin, prot, pvp, specs, talents, World of Warcraft

On the Blizzard forums, Crygil has posted about plans to change the rating spread for the 3v3 and 5v5 brackets so it looks similar to that for 2v2. As a result, they’re going to increase the rating requirement for the tier 2 furious weapons from 2200 to 2350.

He also mentioned they’re going to try and bring it back to 2200 next season, presumably adjusting the ratings curve downwards at the same time. A lot of people have been complaining about the ratings inflation that the new system has brought in, so it sounds like a reasonable plan to me.

He didn’t mention when the patch would hit, but if they want to get this active before the first people are able to purchase their main-hands (I guess some people have off-hands already?) it will have to be before the reset this Tuesday.

The tier 1 weapons are still fairly easy (relatively speaking!) to obtain – they’re unchanged from the current 1850 requirement, and only half a tier behind, so it’s not the end of the world for the 99% of participants who will now be missing out on the best stuff.

I’ve never been on a 2350 rated team personally, but we’re hovering around 2300 at the moment so it’s not outside the realm of possibility.

(Side note: this is going to make the Arena Master achievement significantly more achievable!)

chronic Arena Arena

Rogue gearing has less choice involved than most other classes. To some extent you’ll choose how defensive you want to be, though generally you will use whatever PvE gear you have available. Within your offensive gemming, you can choose whether to focus on agility, attack power, or armor penetration. Basically, though, you’ll either be wearing the rogue PvP set, the highest ilvl rogue PvE pieces you can get your hands on, enough hit rating to get to the specials cap and then damage, damage, damage.

That’s fine, though to some extent I’m envious of caster classes that get to worry about things like haste plateaus and actually get to consider the comp they’re playing when they decide how to gear. Nevertheless, there’s one area where rogues do have some options, and where playstyle and comp can affect your decisions significantly: your trinkets.

Let’s take a look at what I consider the different options for rogues in season 6. I’ll try to be relatively comp-agnostic, though my rogue+healer 2s bias will probably shine through.

PvP Trinkets – Medallion / Titan-forged Runes

If you’re a human, your active racial means you don’t need to equip a PvP trinket. For everyone else, a trinket from this category is absolutely essential. Thankfully now you have a number of options available to you for the passive part of this trinket. The default one available from honor provides passive resilience, but most rogues are going to prefer the offensive-oriented wintergrasp versions which can bestow attack power, crit, or hit.

Buff Proc Trinkets – Mirror / Anvil / Infuser / Blood / DMC: Greatness / Grim Toll / Mjolnir

These trinkets provide passive damage stats with a proc on a 45 second internal cooldown that provides some sort of short-duration offensive benefit. You get a better deal in terms of sustained dps compared to the activatable trinkets, but the downside is you can’t control the timing and procs can end up partially (or completely) wasted.

In terms of the procs, the huge amount of ArP Mjolnir and Grim Toll provide are the strongest, especially if you have other armor penetration on your gear. They synergize well, which humans can take advantage of.

Grim Toll, Infuser and Blood of the Old Good all have hit passives, which are typically wasted, though that will depend on the rest of your gear. The anvil has a resil passive, which is also not that desirable. For that reason Mjolnir pulls ahead of the pack, with DMC:G a very viable alternative.

DMC:G has another advantage in that the agility it provides confers a non-trivial defensive benefit.

Damage Proc Trinkets – Bandit’s / DMC: Death

These trinkets both have a chance on your attacks to deal direct magical damage, with a similar 45 second ICD. The proc rate is high enough that they’re extremely likely to occur in your initial opener, which makes them very strong for overkill burst openers.

Bandit’s Insignia is significantly better because of it’s very strong attack power passive, but because it drops off heroic Sapphiron it is also quite a bit harder to obtain.

Note that the ICDs for these two trinkets are completely independant, so if you’re a human you can use them both and they will often proc together. This is probably going to get nerfed, but right now it’s very strong!

On-use AP Trinkets – Loatheb’s / Platinum Disks / Wrathstone

These trinkets provide an attack power buff on a two-minute cooldown. The strength of them lies in the fact you can choose exactly when to activate them, so you can time them with enchant procs, with other trinkets, or for moments when you have momentum in the fight (successful kidney shot that your opponent won’t trinket, for example).

The flipside of this is that some people find another keybind challenging to manage; and the fact you’re waiting for a perfect opportunity means some time will be wasted. Activating these trinkets does not trigger a global so you could theoretically macro them to one of your other abilities.

The disks have a resil passive, but they’re very easy to get compared to the other two.

On-use Damage Trinkets – GLG

This trinket has been tweaked since its somewhat overpowered inception as a high damage cast-time nuke in season 5. It’s now instant cast and off the GCD completely, but it shares the 10 second “burst damage” cooldown category with activated buff trinkets and the pyro-rocket glove enchant. Compared to Bandit’s/Death, it has a slightly longer cooldown (60 seconds instead of 45) and can’t be timed with the rockets, but it has the advantages that it’s completely controllable and usable from range.

The crit rating is a decent passive, but the fact that this trinket still backfires means it’s not nearly as desirable as some of the alternatives. Not terrible, but not amazing, which I guess is to be expected from a profession blue.

Defensive Trinkets – Battlemaster’s / DMC: Berserker!

The Battlemaster trinket provides a short-term health boost which can be very helpful if you’re able to get it off (can’t do that while stunned). It’s purchased with honor, and much like the wintergrasp trinkets, you have your choice of passives: hit, crit, haste, ap. The attack power one is by far the strongest in terms of raw damage.

DMC:B is something of an odd customer. It procs off both incoming and outgoing damage, and has quite a high proc rate, so it’s going to be up pretty much all of the time you’re in combat. Essentially it’s a passive 105 resil and 105 crit rating. It’s not bad, but perhaps not as exciting as some of the alternatives.

On-use Tentacles – Vanquished Clutches

Tentacles. Need I say more?

chronic Arena, Rogue Arena, pvp, Rogue, trinkets

Dresorull has posted patch notes for the upcoming changes in 3.1.2, there’s some minor rebalancing of priests and destruction warlocks.

Penance cooldown is going back up, maim is an actual stun (maybe?) and innervate is getting a pretty decent PvP buff. Most importantly from a rogue POV, they’re removing spammable blood boil!

I mentioned in my last post about paladin glyphs that using Glyph of Turn Evil was basically a metagame choice. Since then, I’ve seen maybe two death knights in arena, and not many more warlocks, so I think it’s time to retire it in favor of something more exciting.

So, as usual, it may be educational to see what everyone else is doing…

(Reckoning 2v2, top 200 teams)

Today I’m defining “holy paladins” as paladins who have holy shock and at least one point in unyielding faith which should hopefully narrow it down to PvP healing specs only. I’m not going to worry about deep prot healing specs, at least… not yet.

Here’s the same chart run against the infamous Bloodlust battlegroup:

Note that the top 200 teams actually goes right down to about 2k rating at the moment, so a lot of these people are probably not superstars.

chronic Data Mining, Paladin 3.1.2, Arena, gchart, glyphs, graphs, Paladin, pvp

Interesting arena graph du jour; popular arena compositions on Reckoning! The first week of the season is over now but given that everyone started from zero this time around there’s probably a large number of people who still haven’t finished levelling their teams yet. It’s too early to really tell what’s going to dominate the season, and Blizzard have shown that they’re willing to tune as necessary. Nevertheless, some clear trends have already emerged:

Druid/Warrior making a comeback, believe it! Maybe all the AJ “season 3 was arena’s golden age” cyclone apologists will get what they’re after.

chronic Data Mining, World of Warcraft Arena, gchart, graphs, pvp, reckoning